Just Finished: Star Wars Force Unleashed (2008)

I went to the video game store about a month back and picked up a couple new games that I’ve been wanting to check out. And by “new” I mean “used but new to me.” I got Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Brutal Legend. I actually started playing Legend first, but I wanted something a little more action packed, so I moved to Force and banged it out fairly quickly. Actually, when I got to the end the other day, I was pretty surprised, which is pretty much the same experience I had with Modern Warfare 2, which I never got around to reviewing.

Anyway, I really liked this game, but my own impatience lead to me missing out on a lot of the story elements. See, when I want to play video games, I want to kick ass, kill bad guys (or good guys, whatever, I don’t care) and move on. Cut scenes are boring to me, but eventually I got pulled into them because, hey, this is Star Wars.

The basic idea of the game is that you’re Darth Vader’s secret apprentice leading into the original trilogy. You flip back and forth from Jedi to Sith killing everything from Wookies and Jawas to Stormtroopers and droids.

Action-wise, the game’s a lot of fun, though it does have two aspects that really got on my nerves. The first is that the aiming mechanic kind of sucks. You’ll be fighting one dude, throwing force lightning and not hitting the one guy on screen. I could see missing if there were a dozen enemies, but when there’s one? In my opinion, the targeting should be better and more automatic. My second problem with the game is that there are way too many quicktime events. Those are the battle mechanics where you’re slashing away at a bad guy and all of a sudden it cuts to a pre-made movie with various button combinations popping up on screen. I HATE these. Let me kill the damn things on my own, don’t take away from my victory by taking over!

I’m not a great video game player, but this one definitely grabbed my attention and challenged me. I definitely had to look up how to beat various levels because I was just dying left and right, but after a while, I’d either figure it out or look it up and move on to yet another level where I get to kick further ass. So, it’s a fun action game with a fun leveling up system that will be fun for Star Wars fans and just general action game fans because it’s a ton of fun.